It is still an open question whether increasing life expectancy as such is causing higher health care expenditures (HCE) in a population. According to the "red herring" hypothesis, the positive correlation between age and HCE is exclusively due to the fact that mortality rises with age and a...

It is still an open question whether increasing life expectancy as such is causing higher health care expenditures (HCE). According to the "red-herring"-hypothesis, the positive correlation between age and HCE is exclusively due to the fact that mortality rises with age and a large share of HCE...

Some people believe that the impact of population ageing on future health care ex-penditures will be quite moderate due to the high costs of dying. If not age per se but proximity to death determines the bulk of expenditures, a shift in the mortality risk to higher ages will not affect lifetime...

One of the most important controversies in health economics concerns the question whether the imminent aging of the population in most OECD countries will increase per-capita health care expenditures (HCE). Proponents of the "red-herring hypothesis" argue that this is not the case because most...

20 years ago, Zweifel, Felder and Meier (1999) established the by now famous "red-herring" hypothesis, according to which population ageing does not lead to an increase in per capita health care expenditures (HCE) because the observed positive correlation between age and health care expenditures...

One of the most important controversies in health economics concerns the question whether the imminent aging of the population in most OECD countries will place an additional burden on the tax payers who finance public health care systems. Proponents of the “red-herring hypothesis” argue...